Page 21 of Orc’s Harvest

I go into the burning chapel because I hear heartbeats where there shouldn’t be any — faint, slow, coming from somewhere beneath the floor instead of anywhere a living person should be standing.

Smoke fills the nave, thick enough to blind; roof timbers crack somewhere above me, and I find the crypt stairs behind a fallen pew, half-buried under debris but passable if I’m willing to crawl. I am. The heartbeats get louder the further down I go, and by the time I reach the bottom I’m counting at least a dozen of them, slow and thready, coming from a row of villagers chained along the crypt wall — alive, breathing, staring at me with the blank horror of people who don’t have their own names left to give me. A woman near the end still wears her apron, flour dust ground into the fabric like she was pulled straight out of her own kitchen mid-task.

“Can you hear me?” I pitch my voice low and move fast down the row, checking each face for injuries I can actually treat. Nobody answers with more than a flinch. Whatever’s been taken from them, it’s taken the part that would let them respond to a friendly voice at all.

A voice answers instead, warm and familiar and utterly wrong, coming from the altar at the top of the crypt stairs behind me.

“You always did rush toward the ones who needed saving before you checked whether you did.”

I know that voice. I’ve heard it a hundred times in memory since I was young enough to be carried on a hip instead of walking beside one, and hearing it now, here, in a burning crypt full of chained strangers, closes something cold and hard around my throat.

I turn. My mother stands at the altar exactly as I remember her from the one portrait Koira kept—young, dark-haired, a face I’ve only ever seen painted rather than lived, built from pieces stolen from grief Koira never let herself finish having. Even the way she tilts her head matches the portrait exactly, her mouth curved the same small, sad way Koira used to trace with one finger when she thought I wasn’t watching. I’ve imagined this face a thousand times over the years, and not once pictured it standing over chained strangers in a burning crypt.

“Koira killed me.” Her voice stays gentle, terrible, patient. “The ritual accident wasn’t an accident at all, Zalie. Your grandmother caused it. She’s the reason you grew up without a mother, and she kept the truth from you every single day since, because the truth would have cost her the only family she had left.”

I don’t argue with it. Arguing gives it exactly the kind of attention it’s built to feed on, and this valley’s taught me better these last few days than to hand it anything at all.

I reach instead for whatever’s left of Kalthor in the back of my mind, faint now, fading fast — and find him still there, still fighting, driving toward me through smoke and fire with the same single-minded fury he’d bring to anything trying to take something of his. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

I draw his clan knife instead of my own.

The black iron answers to my blood magic the second it clears the sheath, humming warm against my palm like it’s been waiting its whole existence for exactly this working, and I drive it up through the false shape wearing my mother’s face in one clean motion before it finishes whatever speech it had planned next. It doesn’t bleed. It unravels, the same way the false Koira did in the orchard, threads of stolen grief scattering into smoke and gone.

The stairs choose that exact moment to give out entirely, burning timber crashing down across the only way out, and there’s no room left to feel anything about what I just did to a thing wearing my mother’s face before I’m hauling the nearest chained villager toward the wall instead, working the manacles loose with a blade that’s apparently good for more than one kind of cutting.

I force roots up through the crypt floor next, calling them out of packed earth that hasn’t seen daylight in centuries, building a rough living ramp through the collapsed stairwell fast enough that my hands are bleeding by the time it’s done. The woman in the flour-dusted apron goes up first, then an old man who can’t stop shaking, then a boy small enough that I have to half-carry him myself. I’m hauling the fourth villager up it when the wall beside me simply isn’t a wall anymore.

Kalthor comes through it with six warriors behind him, axe first, already scanning the room for me before the dust settles.

He doesn’t ask if I’m hurt. He doesn’t waste breath telling me to get behind him either.

“Where’s the knot?” His eyes find the tangle of black roots pulsing wrong beneath the altar, the same corrupted architecture I recognized the second I saw it. “Show me.”

Behind him, the six warriors fan out to cover the crypt entrance without being told, already forming a line between us and whatever else might still be down here.

We reach the knot without a word wasted between us, and it takes both our blades working the same cut to sever it clean — his axe for the thick outer roots, my knife for the finer threads underneath, until the whole black mass shudders once and goes dark. The chained villagers behind us gasp in unison as something releases its hold on them all at once.

Getting everyone out costs the rest of what daylight we have left. By the time we clear the chapel doors, the fighting’s moved to the village well, where vines, black and animate, have dragged three separate villagers halfway into the water, roots wrapped tight enough around their ankles to leave the marks of a fight nobody’s currently winning. A boy no older than ten screams for his father from the well’s edge, too small to break the grip alone.

“The well!” I’m already running for it, calling every living thing in the ground toward my hands instead of theirs, fighting corrupted growth with growth of my own until the vines around the nearest villager loosen enough for two warriors to haul her free. The boy’s father comes up gasping, mud-black to the shoulders, and I don’t have breath to spare celebrating it before the next set of vines lash out for the boy himself.

Kalthor doesn’t wait for the vines to loosen on their own. He brings his axe down through the stone lip of the well in a single brutal stroke, cracking whatever binding rune held the corruption anchored there, and hundreds of gold threads burst free at once, streaming up out of the black water and scattering into the darkening sky like a net finally cut loose.

The Hollow Men still fighting through the square scatter with them, driven back toward the tree line, though not before I watch fire catch across what’s left of the surviving wheat fields, orange light climbing the hills in every direction the wind decides to take it. Rowan Hollow will stand. What’s left of its harvest won’t.

We end up in the ruined mill an hour later, the worst of the fires finally contained, the wounded settled as well as they can be until proper healers arrive from the Keep. Smoke still hangs low over what’s left of the village, and somewhere past the broken millstone, a woman sings quietly to a child who won’t stop shaking. Kalthor finds me checking a child’s burned hands by lantern light, and doesn’t say anything until I’ve finished, patient in a way that visibly takes real effort to maintain.

“I lost you.” Low, pitched only for me now that we’re alone enough that the words don’t have to compete with anyone else’s hearing. “In the chapel. Whatever I’ve had of you since the Circle, it went dark, and for about three seconds I stopped being able to think past that at all.”

“The same thing happened to me in the square.” I set the bandages aside and finally let myself meet his stare fully, something neither of us has managed since the fighting started. “Not knowing where you were. It’s worse than any fight I’ve been in this week, and I’ve been in several.”

He closes what’s left of the space between us and kisses me like the whole day’s been building toward exactly this, both hands finding my hips and pulling me flush against him, mine sliding up to pull him closer by the back of his neck. Nobody stops it on purpose. It’s slower than the courtyard, hungrier than the door in my ransacked room, and we finally get one full minute where nobody’s screaming, and nothing’s actively burning. We stop because somebody two rooms over calls for help lifting a beam off a trapped goat, and duty wins the way it always eventually does, but not before his hand’s fisted carefully in my hair and his mouth stays close enough to mine that pretending otherwise stops being an option for either of us.

“When we’re back at the Keep.” Rough, low, not quite steady. “I want a locked door. Several hours. No interruptions.”

“You’d better make sure the Keep’s still standing, then.”

We’re loading the last of the wounded onto wagons when something crawls out of the ruined well behind us — burned black, barely holding a shape anymore, dragging itself across the mud on what’s left of its arms. Every warrior nearby freezes at once, weapons half-raised, nobody quite willing to strike something already dying inches from them.